Chapter 92: Liliruca: I Am Absolutely Winning Right Now.
....
Having debriefed with Akane herself, Sanae now had a working understanding of how to pass. Not flawlessly — she wasn't aiming for flawless — but convincingly enough that Kihara wouldn't notice anything worth investigating.
"Kihara! I just remembered I left some monster clay half-finished at home — I'm going back to work on it!"
"Oh, sure."
"Akane" departed Moriya Shrine with the breezy energy she'd been briefed to deploy. "Sanae" leaned against the torii pillar and turned to Kihara with the warmth of someone who had been waiting for this opening.
"There are still a few Gunpla boxes you left me that I haven't opened yet. Want to build one together?"
He was about to agree when something dropped out of the shadow at his feet and wrapped around his neck with the grip strength of a small, determined marsupial.
"M-Master... I want to go home and eat donuts..."
Shinobu Or the body that was Shinobu.
Clinging to his neck, voice slightly off from its usual register in a way that was just barely below the threshold of obviously wrong.
The person currently wearing Sanae's body narrowed her eyes.
She wasn't sure why — whether it was some property of Sanae's shrine-maiden-tuned constitution, or the residual sensitivity that came with wearing someone else's body — but her perception of presence had sharpened considerably since the swap.
And whatever was inside Shinobu's body right now was radiating something distinctly different from Shinobu's usual frequency.
She and Sanae had already theorized the source: the shared meal at Kihara's house the previous evening. It was the only common factor between two people who'd had no physical contact with each other.
And if that was the mechanism, then everyone else who'd eaten there last night was potentially walking around in the wrong head too.
What she needed was confirmation. She arranged her expression into something appropriately curious.
"Kihara, who's this?"
"Shinobu, One of my girlfriends — she usually lives in my shadow."
"Shinobu-san. Nice to meet you."
A nod. No words. The specific minimum-social-engagement response of someone deeply averse to interacting with strangers.
Reclusive. Anti-social. Very on-brand for the shut-in type.
Which told her nothing definitively, since Shinobu herself shared some of those traits.
She shifted tactics. "Donuts are the fried dough kind, right? It's a bit of a trip back — I actually have all the ingredients here. Kihara, you could just make them for Shinobu-san in the shrine kitchen."
"That works."
"No. Wanting to go home. Want to eat there."
Kihara gave "Sanae" an apologetic look, reached up, and ran his hand gently through Shinobu's golden hair. "Sorry — I'll have to take a rain check on the Gunpla. She really wants to head back."
"I understand. Oh — Shinobu-san." She kept her tone light. "What's your favorite donut flavor? For next time, if you come to the shrine."
A pause.
"...Red tea. Red tea flavor is fine."
Vampire. Attached to Kihara like a limpet.
Red tea donuts.
That's Flandre Scarlet.
Akane-in-Sanae's-body did the math. She didn't know the Scarlet Devil Mansion's younger resident in great detail — most of what she knew had been absorbed through post-activity conversation with Kihara, pieced together from context — but enough pieces were present.
She watched them leave, glanced down at her current chest situation, and experienced a quiet, settled satisfaction.
If I'd ended up with Flandre's build I'd have nothing to work with. The current configuration is objectively superior for face-related applications. I stand by my equipment.
On the road back to Pelican Town, Flandre-in-Shinobu's-body abandoned the shadow space entirely.
She migrated from Kihara's front to his back, opened her mouth, and gently set her small fangs against the side of his neck — not breaking skin, just present, applying the precise pressure of someone working through an instinct that this body knew very well and that she was interpreting through a slightly different framework.
The sharpness of the canines moved across the skin like the tip of a pen tracing a slow line.
"Shinobu. What are you doing?"
She didn't answer. She had gone somewhere private in her own head, the specific contentment of someone tasting something that wasn't food but was adjacent to what food felt like. Her cheeks moved with a rhythm that would have been impossible to read from the outside.
This body knows how to do this. It's like eating soft ice cream. There's a technique.
She had not expected to wake up as the true ancestor who followed Kihara around. They'd crossed paths a handful of times — enough to have catalogued her speech patterns and her particular way of minimizing interaction. That had been sufficient for the morning's social navigation.
The "suspicious Sanae" she'd noticed at the shrine hadn't seemed worth pursuing. There were more important things.
Specifically: a list.
Flandre had been maintaining it since she understood her situation. Things I want to do with Big Brother that I haven't been able to do yet.
Sleep together. ✓ (pending — tonight)
Bath. (negotiable)
Eat together. (imminent — donuts)
Play games. (very achievable)
Show off to that idiot Cirno. (requires Cirno's presence)
She reviewed it with satisfaction.
Then she reviewed it again with a small frown.
All of these things were things she genuinely wanted. But none of them produced the particular sensation that biting did — that full-body tremor, the warmth in the pit of the stomach, the feeling of something deeply right being satisfied. She couldn't explain why.
Why does everything I want to do with Big Brother feel completely different from drinking blood?
She didn't have the vocabulary for it. The basement had not been a comprehensive educational environment. She filed the question under figure out later as Pelican Town came into view — the fields, the houses, the summer light hitting everything at the particular angle that this world seemed to favor.
This is where Big Brother lives?
She'd been expecting something Gothic. Towers. Dark stone. The aesthetic that tended to cluster around vampires as an organizing principle.
Instead: vegetable garden, White fence, Sunflowers.
It's completely different from what I imagined.
And then — the sun.
She flinched. Instinctively, deeply, the reflex coded into a thousand years of what it meant to be what she was.
It didn't burn.
The temperature rose slightly. That was all. The agony that lived in her memory like a recurring bad dream simply... wasn't there.
Just warmth. Just light.
She stood in it for a moment, processing this, while Kihara walked ahead.
Interesting.
"Go sit down — I'll make the donuts."
"Pop."
When she released his neck, her mouth made the sound of a cork being pulled from a bottle — clear, resonant, slightly absurd. She looked at the deep red impression her lips had left on his skin.
Something warm moved through her. Not the feeding warmth. Something else.
Mine.
She settled onto the sofa, swinging her bare feet, watching the kitchen door close behind him.
The front door opened.
Liliruca and someone wearing Liliruca's body walked in.
The one that wasn't Liliruca — small, round-faced, carrying herself with a casual ease that Liliruca's usual demeanor didn't quite match — spotted her immediately and raised an eyebrow.
"Huh. Shinobu, you're actually out in the open today?"
"Watermelon?"
"...What?"
"Interesting."
Three small figures looked at each other.
Then, by mutual unspoken agreement, they moved to the corner of the room and convened a whispered conference.
It didn't take long.
"So we're all the same situation," Flandre-in-Shinobu confirmed, keeping her voice low.
"I'm Flandre. Big Brother doesn't know. Nobody tell him."
"Lili thinks this is the kind of thing Kihara-sama should probably know about."
"If you say anything, Suika and I will find a room somewhere in this house and lock you in it until our consciousnesses go back where they belong."
"...Lili won't say anything."
Suika-in-Liliruca's-body appreciated a pragmatist. She patted the small face she was currently wearing, adopted the speech pattern she'd been briefed on, and trotted toward the kitchen with the energy of a child volunteering enthusiastically.
"Kihara-sama~ does Lili get to help with anything~?"
From the sofa, the real Liliruca-in-someone-else's-body watched this performance with the expression of someone watching their own identity be operated by a stranger.
"Ribbit!! She's actually pulling it off—!!"
....
Thank you for reading.